Trying to record history of project, this is the brack with R
D our bookkeeper resigned due to facing a long prison time for a peaceful direct action at a arms fair protest that went wrong. In the end she got a year long suspended sentence which we were all delighted for her not going to prison.
Much of the money side of the project had been handled by Richard with D administering the bank account. I had a strong feeling that there were issues with the use of funding over a few years. When D resigned I’ve decided to froze the bank account (no money in or out for both of us) and spent some time going through the account trying to find out what actually had been happening.
What I found was worrying and drove my fears that there was a large hole in the working account. What I thought was a healthy positive working balance was in fact the outstanding money to be payed to the Resistance Exhibition (one of the external projects VisiononTV has been supporting). Looking back 3 years none of the funding that Richard has put through the account with his external projects had left any money aside to cover the running costs of Visionontv core which is around £600-800 a year This was agreed before he came on board and stated to him repeatedly over the years since, he has only spoken out about the last few months and is now very vocal since I looked though the accounts.
From PO undercurrents "The % expenses - spell it out and ask how any business can survive if the core costs are not paid? Undercurrents took 10% of any fund that came through UC to pay for book keeping and other admin."
A outline of issues:
There have been problems with the working of the project for a long time.
The last project I started: Me and Phoenix started and defined the Resistance Exhibition and Richard was brought in ONLY to do the fund-raising part of the project, as I did not trust him to get further involved in the project A document I wrote at the time . The outcome of this was the clear end of our working relationship.
Over the last 2 years it has been hard for me to move forwarded with the rebooting of #openweb due to a strong feeling that any decisions I would make with out him would be used to attack me latter. While the was still money in the main working account he passively aggressively blocked decision making by simply refusesing to address issues.
Richard is a shareholder of visionontv but he has clearly not been working for visionontv for the last few years.
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Richard has not received a wage from visionontv for more than 3 years.
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Has no involvement in the two current Visionontv projects: the OMN or the Mastodon social network and is not active in the core Visionontv video aggregation project.
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Has not produced/Published a video or updated the Visionontv sites for over a year.
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He took over the last project I launched (the Resistance Exhibition) breaking my remaining trust in him.
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He has strong compromised the remaining funds of the general account, by not contributing for basic running costs, and is now completely out of order.
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He then put a further external funding check (for the RE) through the account without previous warning and after there was an email raising his awareness for the negative funds on Visionontv accounts and outlined the urgent requirement that any external funds should contribute with a percentage to cover running costs. When he was asked to contribute with this percentage he still refused to cover this. Not knowing what to do with this I’ve ended up transferring this funding to him minus the running cost deduction which had clearly been outlined previously.
Email sent before he put the check through "Regarding the next batch of funding, made out to Visionontv for the exhibition we could transfer the funds out (with the 10% service fee) if you would like to do that."
There is now no funding left in the core/shard account. But there is still 10K which was put aside to reboot the tech side of the Visionontv project which I am responsible for. This is clearly labeled and agreed as such. And there is a bit over a thousand £ back wages for me as I stopped paying myself from the original funding months before Richard did. Again clearly labeled and agreed.
I am submitting in the next few weeks, a small funding grant to Lush to cover the costs of the Mastodon projects rollouts. 10% of this plus the small amount from the last Richard’s cheque will be sufficient to cover this years' core expense or Visionontv
Hamish
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Currently I am being paid £50/month for the OMN project that has been running for a year and posting to 10 test sites this is under active development. I’ve tried a community (not funded) rollout last year which did not flower. Next step is a funded roll out so looking for funding for this.
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Currently £50/week for the Mastodon installs which am working on full time. I plan to pay this back to the tech fund from the Lush funding application (if successful).
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There is a working youtube clone code that is now developing that is based on the same technology as the OMN and Mastodon. This is likely to be used for the visionontv video site reboot. Looking at this for the next step.
It is the right time to reboot the openweb and push out distribution of media work alongside and outside the dotcons of facebook, twitter and youtube and the rest of the closed pay per view siloes. This is the original visionontv project.